Political Concept : Legitimacy

Legitimacy is usually defined simply as ‘rightfulness’. As such, it is crucial to the distinction between power and authority. Legitimacy is the quality that transforms naked power into rightful authority; it confers upon an order or command an authoritative or binding character, ensuring that it is obeyed out of duty rather than because of fear. Clearly, there is a close relationship between legitimacy and authority, the two terms sometimes being used synonymously. As they are most commonly used, however, people are said to have authority whereas it is political systems that are described as legitimate. Indeed, much of political theory amounts to a dis-cussion about when, and on what grounds, government can command legitimacy. This question is of vital importance because, as noted earlier, in the absence of legitimacy, government can only be sustained by fear, intimidation and violence. As Rousseau put it in The Social Contract ([1762] 1969), ‘The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master unless he transforms strength into right and obedience into duty.’

Deep disagreement nevertheless surrounds the concept of legitimacy. The most widely used meaning of the term is drawn, once again, from Weber. Weber took legitimacy to refer to nothing more or less than a belief in the ‘right to rule’, a belief in legitimacy. In other words, providing its peoples are prepared to comply, a system of rule can be described as legitimate. This contrasts sharply with the inclination of most political philosophers, which is to try to identify a moral or rational basis for legitimacy, thereby suggesting a clear and objective difference between legitimate and illegitimate forms of rule. For instance, Aristotle argued that rule was legitimate only when it operated to the benefit of the whole society rather than in the selfish interests of the rulers, while Rousseau argued that government was legitimate if it was based upon the ‘general will’. In The Legitimation of Power (1991), David Beetham attempted to develop a social-scientific concept of legitimacy but one that departs significantly from Weber’s. In Beetham’s view, to define legitimacy as nothing more than a ‘belief in legitimacy’ is to ignore how it is brought about. This leaves the matter largely in the hands of the powerful, who may be able to manufacture rightfulness by public relations campaigns and the like. He therefore proposed that power can be said to be legitimate only if three conditions are fulfilled. First, power must be exercised according to established rules, whether embodied in formal legal codes or informal conventions. Second, these rules must be justified in terms of the shared beliefs of the government and the governed. Third, legitimacy must be demonstrated by the expression of consent on the part of the governed.

In addition to disagreement about the meaning of the term, there is also debate about the means through which power is legitimized, or what is referred to as the ‘legitimation process’. Following Beetham, it can be argued that legitimacy is conferred only upon regimes that exercise power according to established and accepted principles, notably regimes that rule on the basis of popular consent. Others, however, have suggested that most, and perhaps all, regimes attempt to manufacture legitimacy by manipulating what their citizens know, think or believe. In effect, legitimacy may simply be a form of ideological hegemony or dominance. Moreover, there are also questions about when, how and why political systems lose their legitimacy and suffer what are called ‘legitimation crises’. A legitimation crisis is particularly serious since it casts doubt upon the very survival of the regime or political system: no regime has so far endured permanently through the exercise of coercion alone.

Constitutionalism and Consent

Liberal democracy is often portrayed as the only stable and enduringly successful form of government. Its virtue, its supporters argue, is that it contains the means of its own preservation: it is able to guarantee continued legitimacy by ensuring that government power is not unchecked or arbitrary but is, rather, exercised in accordance with the wishes, preferences and interests of the general public. This is achieved through two principal devices. In the first place, such regimes operate within certain ‘rules of power’, taking the form of some kind of constitution. These supposedly ensure that individual liberty is protected and government power is constrained. Second, liberal democracies provide a basis for popular consent in the form of regular, open and competitive elections. From this point of view, legitimacy is founded upon the willing and rational obedience of the governed; government is rightful only so long as it responds to popular pressure.

A constitution can be understood, in its simplest sense, as the rules which govern the government. Constitutions are thus sets of rules which allocate duties, powers and functions to the various institutions of government and define the relationship between individuals and the state. In so doing, constitutions define and limit government power, preventing government acting simply as it chooses. However, constitutions can take a variety of different forms. In most countries, and virtually all liberal democracies, so-called ‘written’ or codified constitutions exist. These draw together major constitutional rules in a single authoratative document, ‘the Constitution’. The first example of such a document was the US Con-stitution, drawn up at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. The ‘written’ constitution itself is a form of higher or supreme law, which stands above statute laws made by the legislature. In this way, codified constitutions both entrench major constitutional rules and invest the courts with the power of judicial review, making them the ‘guardians of the constitution’. In a small number of liberal democracies – the UK and Israel are now the only examples – no such codified document exists. In these so-called ‘unwritten’ constitutions, supreme constitutional authority rests, in theory, with the legislature, in the UK’s case Parliament. Other constitutional rules may be found in sources as diverse as conventions, common law and works of constitutional authority.

Constitutions confer legitimacy upon a regime by making government a rule-bound activity. Constitutional governments therefore exercise legal-rational authority; their powers are authorized by constitutional law. Historically, the demand for constitutional government arose when the earlier claim that legitimacy was based upon the will of God – the Divine Right of Kings – was called into question. However, the mere existence of a constitution does not in itself ensure that government power is rightfully exercised. In other words, constitutions do not merely confer legitimacy; they are themselves bodies of rules which are subject to questions of legitimacy. In reality, as Beetham insists, a constitution confers legitimacy only when its principles reflect values and beliefs which are widely held in society. Government power is therefore legitimate if it is exercised in accordance with rules that are reasonable and acceptable in the eyes of the governed. For instance, despite the enactment of four successive constitu-tions – in 1918, 1924, 1936 and 1977 – the Soviet Union strove with limited success to achieve legitimacy. This occurred both because many of the provisions of the constitution, notably those stipulating individual rights, were never respected, and because major principles like the Communist Party’s monopoly of power simply did not correspond with the values and aspirations of the mass of the Soviet people.

Conformity to accepted rules may be a necessary condition for legitimacy, but it is not a sufficient one. Constitutional governments may nevertheless fail to establish legitimacy if they do not, in some way, ensure that government rests upon the consent or agreement of the people. The idea of consent arose out of social contract theory and the belief that government had somehow arisen out of a voluntary agreement undertaken by free individuals. John Locke, for instance, was perfectly aware that government had not in practice developed out of a social contract, but argued, rather, that citizens ought to behave as if it had. He therefore developed the notion of ‘tacit consent’, an implied agreement among citizens to obey the law and respect government. However, for consent to confer legitimacy upon a regime it must take the form not of an implied agreement but of voluntary and active participation in the political life of the community. Political participation is thus the active expression of consent.

Many forms of political rule have sought legitimacy through encoura-ging expressions of popular consent. This applies even in the case of fascist dictatorships like Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, where consider-able effort was put into mobilizing mass support for the regime by plebiscites, rallies, marches, demonstrations and so on. The most common way in which popular consent can be demonstrated, however, is through elections. Even one-party states, such as orthodox communist regimes, have found it desirable to maintain elections in the hope of generating legitimacy. As these were single-party and single-candidate elections, however, their significance was limited to their propaganda value. Quite simply, voters rarely regard non-competitive elections as a meaningful form of political participation or as an opportunity to express willing consent. By contrast, open and competitive electoral systems, typically found in liberal democracies, offer citizens a meaningful choice, and so give them the power to remove politicians and parties that are thought to have failed. In such circumstances, the act of voting is a genuine expression of active consent. From this perspective, liberal-democratic regimes can be said to maintain legitimacy through their willingness to share power with the general public.

Ideological Hegemony

The conventional image of liberal democracies is that they enjoy legitimacy because, on the one hand, they respect individual liberty and, on the other, they are responsive to public opinion. Critics, however, suggest that constitutionalism and democracy are little more than a facade concealing the domination of a ‘power elite’ or ‘ruling class’. Neo-Marxists such as Ralph Miliband (1982) have, for example, portrayed liberal democracy as a ‘capitalist democracy’, suggesting that within it there are biases which serve the interests of private property and ensure the long-term stability of capitalism. Since the capitalist system is based upon unequal class power, Marxists have been reluctant to accept that the legitimacy of such regimes is genuinely based upon willing obedience and rational consent. Radical thinkers in the Marxist and anarchist traditions have, as a result, adopted a more critical approach to the legitimation process, one which emphasizes the degree to which legitimacy is produced by ideological manipulation and indoctrination.

It is widely accepted that ideological control can be used to maintain stability and build legitimacy. This is reflected, for example, in the ‘radical’ view of power, discussed earlier, which highlights the capacity to manip-ulate human needs. The clearest examples of ideological manipulation are found in totalitarian regimes which propagate an ‘official ideology’ and ruthlessly suppress all rival creeds, doctrines and beliefs. The means through which this is achieved are also clear: education is reduced to a process of ideological indoctrination; the mass media is turned into a propaganda machine; ‘unreliable’ beliefs are strictly censored; political opposition is brutally stamped out, and so on. In this way, national socialism became a state religion in Nazi Germany, as did Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union.

Marxists, however, claim to identify a similar process at work within liberal democracies. Despite the existence of competitive party systems, autonomous pressure groups, a free press and constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, Marxists argue that liberal democracies are nevertheless dominated by what they call ‘bourgeois ideology’. The concept of ‘ideology’ has had a chequered history, not least because it has been ascribed such very different meanings. The term itself was coined by Destutt de Tracy in 1796 to describe a new ‘science of ideas’. This meaning did not, however, long survive the French Revolution, and the term was taken up in the nineteenth century in the writings of Karl Marx. In the Marxist tradition, ‘ideology’ denotes sets of ideas which tend to conceal the contradictions upon which all class societies were based. Ideologies therefore propagate falsehood, delusion and mystification. They nevertheless serve a powerful social function: they stabilize and consolidate the class system by reconciling the exploited to their exploitation. Ideology thus operates in the interests of a ‘ruling class’, which controls the process of intellectual production as completely as it controls the process of material production. In a capitalist society, for example, the bourgeoisie dominates the educational, cultural, intellectual and artistic life. As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology ([1846)] 1970), ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.’

This is not, however, to suggest that these ‘ruling ideas’ monopolize intellectual life and exclude all rival views. Indeed, modern Marxists have clearly acknowledged that cultural, ideological and political competition does exist, but stress that this competition is unequal, in that the ideas and views which uphold the capitalist order enjoy a crushing advantage over the ideas and theories which question or challenge it. Such indoctrination may, in fact, be far more successful precisely because it operates behind the illusion of free speech, open competition and political pluralism. The most influential exponent of such a view has been Antonio Gramsci, who drew attention to the degree to which the class system was upheld not simply by unequal economic and political power but also by what he termed bourgeois ‘hegemony’, the ascendancy or domination of bourgeois ideas in every sphere of life. The implications of ideological domination are clear: deluded by bourgeois theories and philosophies, the proletariat will be incapable of achieving class consciousness and will be unable to realize its revolutionary potential. It would remain a ‘class in itself’ and never become what Marx called a ‘class for itself’.

A similar line of thought has been pursued by what is called the ‘sociology of knowledge’. This has sometimes been seen as an alternative to the Marxist belief in a ‘dominant’ or ruling ideology. One of the founding fathers of this school of sociology, Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), described its goal as uncovering ‘the social roots of our knowledge’. Mannheim (1960) held that ‘how men actually think’ can be traced back to their position in society and the social groups to which they belong, each of which has its own distinctive way of looking at the world. Ideologies, therefore, are ‘socially determined’ and reflect the social circumstances and aspirations of the groups which develop them. In The Social Construction of Reality (1971), Berger and Luckmann broadened this analysis by suggesting that not only organized creeds and ideologies but everything that passes for ‘knowledge’ in society is socially constructed. The political significance of such an analysis is to highlight the extent to which human beings see the world not as it is, but as they think it is, or as society tells them it is. The sociology of knowledge has radical implications for any notion of legitimacy since it implies that individuals cannot be regarded simply as independent and rational actors, capable of distinguishing legitimate forms of rule from non-legitimate ones. In short, legitimacy is always a ‘social construction’.

One of the most influential modern accounts of the process of ideological manipulation has been developed by the US radical intellectual and anarchist theorist, Noam Chomsky. In works such as (with Edward Herman) Manufacturing Consent (1994), Chomsky developed a ‘propa-ganda model’ of the mass media which explains how news and political coverage are distorted by the structures of the media itself. This distortion operates through a series of ‘filters’, such as the impact of private ownership of media outlets, a sensitivity to the views and concerns of advertisers and sponsors, and the sourcing of news and information from ‘agents of power’ such as governments and business-backed think-tanks. Chomsky’s analysis emphasizes the degree to which the mass media can subvert or ‘deter’ democracy, helping, in the USA in particular, to mobilize popular support for imperialist foreign policy goals. The dominant-ideology model of the mass media has nevertheless also been subject to criticism. Objections to it include that it underestimates the extent to which the press and broadcasters, particularly public service broadcasters, pay attention to counter-establishment views and movements. Moreover, the assumption that media output shapes political attitudes is determinist and neglects the role played by people’s own values in filtering, and possibly resisting, media messages.

Legitimation Crises

Whether legitimacy is conferred by willing consent or is manufactured by ideological indoctrination, it is, as already emphasized, essential for the maintenance of any system of political rule. Attention has therefore focused not only on the machinery through which legitimacy is maintained but also upon the circumstances in which the legitimacy of a regime is called into question and, ultimately, collapses. In Legitimation Crisis (1975), the neo-Marxist Jurgen Habermas argued that within liberal democracies there are ‘crisis tendencies’ which challenge the stability of such regimes by undermining legitimacy. The core of this argument was the tension between a private-enterprise or capitalist economy, on one hand, and a democratic political system, on the other; in effect, the system of capitalist democracy may be inherently unstable.

The democratic process forces government to respond to popular pressures, either because political parties outbid each other in attempting to get into power or because pressure groups make unrelenting demands upon politicians once in power. This is reflected in the inexorable rise of public spending and the progressive expansion of the state’s responsibil-ities, especially in economic and social life. Anthony King (1975) described this problem as one of government ‘overload’. Government was over-loaded quite simply because in attempting to meet the demands made of them, democratic politicians came to pursue policies which threatened the health and long-term survival of the capitalist economic order. For instance, growing public spending created a fiscal crisis in which high taxes became a disincentive to enterprise, and ever-rising government borrowing led to permanently high inflation. Habermas’s analysis suggest that liberal democracies cannot permanently satisfy both popular demands for social security and welfare rights, and the requirements of a market economy based upon private profit. Forced either to resist democratic pressures or to risk economic collapse, capitalist democracies will, in his view, find it increasingly difficult to maintain legitimacy.

To some extent, fears of a legitimation crisis painted an over-gloomy picture of liberal-democratic politics in the 1970s. Habermas claimed to identify ‘crisis tendencies’ which are beyond the capacity of liberal democracies to control. In practice, however, the electoral mechanism allows liberal democracies to adjust policy in response to competing demands, thus enabling the system as a whole to retain a high degree of legitimacy, even though particular policies may attract criticism and provoke unpopularity. Much of liberal-democratic politics therefore amounts to shifts from interventionist policies to free-market ones and then back again, as power alternates between left-wing and right-wing governments. There is a sense, however, in which the rise of the New Right since the 1970s can be seen as a response to a legitimation crisis. In the first place, the New Right recognized that the problem of ‘overload’ arose, in part, out of the perception that government could, and would, solve all problems, economic and social problems as well as political ones. As a consequence, New Right politicians such as Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in the UK sought to lower popular expectations of government. This they did by trying to shift responsibility from the state to the individual. Thus welfare was portrayed as largely a matter of individual responsibility, individuals being encouraged to provide for themselves by hard work, savings, medical insurance, private pensions and so forth. Moreover, unemployment was no longer seen as a responsibility of government: there was a ‘natural rate’ of unemployment which could only be pushed up by workers ‘pricing themselves out of jobs’.

More radically, the New Right attempted to challenge and finally displace the theories and values which had previously legitimized the progressive expansion of the state’s responsibilities. In this sense, the New Right amounted to a ‘hegemonic project’ that tried to establish the ascendancy of a rival set of pro-market values and theories. This amounted to a public philosophy which extolled rugged individualism and denigrated the ‘nanny’ state. This project had two themes, a neo-liberal and neo-conservative one. Neo-liberal theories attempt to reassert the autonomy of the market by proclaiming, in essence, that ‘the economy works best when left alone by government’. In this way, economic and social life is portrayed as a private sphere over which the state exercises no rightful influence. Neo-conservatives, on the other hand, call for the restoration of authority, order and discipline. In particular, this reflects a desire to strengthen the authority of government, at least in relation to what the New Right regard as its proper role: law and order, public morality and defence.

While liberal-democratic regimes in the industrialized West have re-mained relatively immune from legitimation crises, the same cannot be said of liberal-democratic government in the developing world. Few developing-world countries have round it easy to sustain political systems based upon an open and competitive struggle for power and respect for a significant range of civil liberties. Although a growing number have developed liberal-democratic features, enduringly successful ones auch as India are still rare. Liberal-democratic experiments have sometimes culminated in military coups or the emergence of single-party rule. Such developments have about them some of the characteristics of a legitimation crisis. For example, structural problems, such as chronic underdevelop-ment, an over-reliance upon cash crops, indebtedness to Western banks and so on, make it difficult, and perhaps impossible, for developing-world regimes to satisfy the expectations which democratic government creates. Furthermore, multi-party democracy often appears inappropriate, and may even be regarded as an obstacle, when society is confronted by the single, overriding goal: the need for social development. From another point of view, however, it is questionable whether such regimes ever enjoyed legitimacy, in which case their fall can hardly be described as a legitimation crisis. Liberal-democratic regimes were often bequeathed to newly independent states by former colonial rulers and reflect values like individualism and competition which are foreign to many parts of the developing world.

The collapse of orthodox communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1989–91, provides a particularly good example of a legitimation crisis or a series of legitimation crises. These crises had a political, economic and social dimension. Politically, orthodox communist regimes were one-party states dominated by a ‘ruling’ communist party whose influence extended over virtually all groups in society. Economic-ally, the centrally planned economies that operated within such regimes proved to be highly inefficient and incapable of generating the widespread, if unequal, prosperity found in the capitalist West. Socially, orthodox communist regimes were undermined by their very achievements: industrialization and the expansion of mass education created a better informed and increasingly sophisticated body of citizens whose demands for the civil liberties and consumer goods thought to be available in the West simply outstripped the capacity of the regime to respond. Such factors progressively undermined the rightfulness or legitimacy of orthodox communism, eventually precipitating mass demonstrations, in 1989 throughout Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union in 1991.

Summary

1 Power is central to the understanding and practice of politics. It can be exercised on three levels: through the ability to make or influence decisions; through the ability to set the agenda and prevent decisions being made; and through the ability to manipulate what people think and want.

2 Power is the ability to influence the behaviour of others, based upon the capacity to reward or punish. By contrast, authority is the right to influence others, based upon their acknowledged duty to obey. Weber distinguished between three kinds of authority: traditional authority based upon custom and history; charismatic authority, the power of personality; and legal-rational authority derived from the formal powers of an office or post.

3 Authority provokes deep political and ideological disagreements. Some regard it as essential to the maintenance of an ordered, stable and healthy society, providing individuals with clear guidance and support. Others warn that authority tends to be the enemy of liberty and to undermine reason and moral responsibility; authority tends to lead to authoritarianism.

4 Legitimacy refers to the ‘rightfulness’ of a political system. It is crucial to the stability and long-term survival of a system of rule because it is regarded as justified or acceptable. Legitimacy may require conformity to widely accepted constitutional rules and broad public support; but it may also be ‘manufactured’ through a process of ideological manipulation and control for the benefit of political or social elites.